flesh (from its freshness) · noun, common masculine singular absolute
life
בְּנַפְשׁ֥וֹbe.naf.Sho
H5315
properly · preposition + noun, common feminine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
blood
דָמ֖וֹda.Mo
H1818
blood (as that which when shed causes death) of man or… · noun, common masculine singular construct + pronominal suffix, 3rd person masculine singular
eat
תֹאכֵֽלוּto.Khe.lu
H398
to eat (literally or figuratively) · verb, qal imperfect, 2nd person masculine plural
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890/1894), public domain; digitized by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA). KJV word tagging: eBible.org (public domain). Original-language text, parsing and brief lexicon: STEPBible.org data from Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0).
Cross-references
Deuteronomy 12:23 Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.
Deuteronomy 12:16 Only ye shall not eat the blood; ye shall pour it upon the earth as water.
Deuteronomy 15:23 Only thou shalt not eat the blood thereof; thou shalt pour it upon the ground as water.
Acts 15:20 But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.
Leviticus 7:26 Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings.
Leviticus 17:10-14 And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even…
Acts 15:29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselv…
Leviticus 3:17 It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.
Cross-references from OpenBible.info (CC BY), in the lineage of the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (public domain).
Commentary
Matthew Henry on Genesis 9:1-7
We read, in the close of the foregoing chapter, the very kind things which God said in his heart, concerning the remnant of mankind which was now left to be the seed of a new world. Now here we have these kind things spoken to them. In general, God blessed Noah and his sons (Gen 9:1), that is, he assured them of his good-will to them and his gracious intentions concerning them. This follows from what he said in his heart. Note, All God's promises of good flow from his purposes of love and the counsels of his own will. See Eph 1:11, Eph 3:11, and compare Jer 29:11. I know the thoughts that I think towards you. We read (Gen 8:20) how Noah blessed God, by his altar and sacrifice. Now here we fi…
But flesh . . . the blood . . . shall ye not eat--The sole intention of this prohibition was to prevent these excesses of cannibal ferocity in eating flesh of living animals, to which men in the earlier ages of the world were liable.
Adam Clarke on Genesis 9:4
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood - Though animal food was granted, yet the blood was most solemnly forbidden, because it was the life of the beast, and this life was to be offered to God as an atonement for sin. Hence the blood was ever held sacred, because it was the grand instrument of expiation, and because it was typical of that blood by which we enter into the holiest. 1. Before the deluge it was not eaten, because animal food was not in use. 2. After the deluge it was prohibited, as we find above; and, being one of the seven Noahic precepts, it was not eaten previously to the publication of the Mosaic law. 3. At the giving of the law, and at several times during the…
But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall you not eat. This is the only exception to the eating of flesh; it was not to be eaten with the blood in it, which is said to be its life; not that the blood is of itself the life, but because it is a means of life, and that being exhausted, the creature must die, and because the animal and vital spirits appear to us most vigorous in it; yea, it is the ailment and support of them, and which furnishes out the greatest quantity of them: or rather it may be rendered, "the flesh with its life in its blood" (m); while there is life in the blood, or while the creature is living; the meaning is, that a creature designed for food sho…
The Church Fathers
WHAT DOES IT MEAN: AND I WILL REQUIRE THE LIFE OF MAN AT THE HAND OF HIS BROTHER? — Will he refer to every man, the brother of every man according to kinship, by whom we all come from one? [
God also blessed Noah and his sons that they might be fruitful and multiply and that fear of them should fall upon all flesh both in the sea and on dry land. "Only you shall not eat flesh with its life." That means you shall eat no flesh that has not been slaughtered and whose blood, which is its life, has not been drained.
Except that you shall not eat flesh with its blood. For blood rightly denotes carnal desires and carnal sense. Blood is poured out when one renounces carnal temptations and thoughts, in which one lived poorly, so that such people can say with the Apostle: Yet I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me (Gal. II, 29). And again: I conferred not immediately with flesh and blood (Gal. I, 16): otherwise, whoever begins to incorporate those persevering in former crimes into the unity of the holy Church by baptizing them, as if eating beasts given by the Lord with blood, because he receives into society those whose conscience is still held by their old way of life as if suffocated. They say that this was the greatest transgression of the giants because they ate flesh with blood; and therefore the Lord, having destroyed them by the flood, indeed allowed people to eat flesh, but prohibited them from doing so with blood.
The Church Fathers: public-domain translations (Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers), verse-indexed by SermonIndex (CC BY 4.0).
Dictionary and topics
Blood — (1.) As food, prohibited in Gen. 9:4, where the use of animal food is first allowed. Comp. Deut. 12:23; Lev. 3:17; 7:26; 17:10-14. The injunction to abstain from blood is renewed in the decree of the…
Covenant — A contract or agreement between two parties. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word berith is always thus translated. Berith is derived from a root which means “to cut,” and hence a covenant is a…
Food — Originally the Creator granted the use of the vegetable world for food to man (Gen. 1:29), with the exception mentioned (2:17). The use of animal food was probably not unknown to the antediluvians.…
Unclean Meats — These were things strangled, or dead of themselves or through beasts or birds of prey; whatever beast did not both part the hoof and chew the cud; and certain other smaller animals rated as “creeping…
B · Not to be eaten alive or with blood — Not to be eaten alive or with blood
Blood · Is the life — Is the life
Deception · General references — General references
Dictionary: Easton's (1897) and Smith's (1863), public domain. Topics: Nave's Topical Bible (1896) and Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897), public domain. Both as parsed by NEUU (CC BY 4.0).
But flesh with the life thereof , which is the blood thereof Some thus explain this passages Ye may not eat a member cut off from a living animal,' which is too trifling. However, since there is no copulative conjunction between the two words, blood and life, I do not doubt that Moses, speaking of the life, added the word blood exegetically, [288] as if he would say, that flesh is in some sense devoured with its life, when it is eaten imbued with its own blood. Wherefore, the life and the blood are not put for different things, but for the same; not because blood is in itself the life, but inasmuch as the vital spirits chiefly reside in the blood, it is, as far as our feeling is concerned, a…
"Every moving thing that liveth shall be food for you; even as the green of the herb have I given you all (את־כּל = חכּל)." These words do not affirm that man then first began to eat animal food, but only that God then for the first time authorized, or allowed him to do, what probably he had previously done in opposition to His will. "Only flesh in its soul, its blood (דמו in apposition to בּנפשׁו), shall ye not eat;" i.e., flesh in which there is still blood, because the soul of the animal is in the blood. The prohibition applies to the eating of flesh with blood in it, whether of living animals, as is the barbarous custom in Abyssinia, or of slaughtered animals from which the blood has not…
A key restriction is imposed. Since blood was identified with life, it had to be drained from a slain animal before its meat could be eaten (see Lev 3:17; 7:26-27; 17:10-14; Deut 12:16, 23). The law of Moses prohibited eating animals that died naturally, since their blood had not been drained (Deut 14:21). God provided animal blood to atone for human sin (Lev 17:11; Heb 9:22).
